


catharsis

by anirondack



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Canon Compliant, Coping, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Post-The Raven King, The Raven King Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-29
Updated: 2016-04-29
Packaged: 2018-06-05 07:02:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6694258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anirondack/pseuds/anirondack
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i> Around them, nothing changes, but the thin bits of thread that have been holding Blue Sargent together since September finally snap.</i>
</p><p>Takes place after the last chapter of The Raven King, before the epilogue. Beware of Raven King spoilers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	catharsis

**Author's Note:**

> thanks to mochroimanam for the beta <3
> 
> you can find a podfic of this work [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7379056)

The BMW is much quieter than the Camaro.

Blue knows this because she’s been listening for the Camaro for several days.

Maura had allowed her to take the rest of the week off school after they had all made it back into Henrietta. She had swept the five of them into the house and forced them all into the shower in turns - usually in twos, one to get clean and one to make sure that the other didn’t fall down. Ronan’s had taken the longest - he had just sat in the tub and let the water pour over him and no one, not even Calla, had the heart to remind him that he would be a dent in the water bill. Gansey, in contrast, had been the quickest. Death had been easy to wash off of his skin, and he didn’t seem to want to be under the water for too long. Adam just handed him a towel and went back to staring at his own wrists.

After that, Maura had bullied food into them and then bullied naps into them and then assigned people to take people places. Adam took Ronan back to the Barns. Henry took Gansey to his parents’ hotel. Maura took Blue to bed.

And Blue has been waiting. She’s spoken to Gansey twice on the phone, and Adam once, and Henry once when she meant to get Gansey but Gansey was busy having some sort of attack (Henry described it as a backwards panic attack and Blue eerily knew what that meant). She hasn’t seen any of them in a few days. It feels strange, after the week they’d had.

But the BMW pulls up and honks twice, and Maura goes to the window and peers out. She squints at the tinted glass, but she can only make out one shadowy figure.

“Blue!” she calls.

Blue trots in from the reading room. She’d been aimlessly walking around it, looking at the righted table and the books that had been put back on the shelf and the spots of her own blood on the floor that no one had succeeded in scrubbing away yet. “What?”

“There’s a car for you.”

“Do you know who’s in it?”

“One of yours,” Maura says, and lets the curtain fall closed.

Blue goes upstairs to get a pair of shoes and a jacket, then goes outside. She stands on her porch and looks at the BMW. The window rolls down and Ronan’s face looks back. “Get in,” he tells her.

Blue silently walks forward and opens the passenger’s side door, then gets in and closes it again. This particular bit of car smells a little like Gansey and a lot like Ronan. She breathes in, then sighs heavily. Ronan starts the engine again and takes off.

Blue settles back in the passenger’s seat. She looks out the window. Ronan’s thumb taps on the steering wheel.

“Where are we going?” Blue asks eventually, when she stops recognizing the streets.

“Thrift store,” Ronan says. He sounds tired. Blue looks at him a little more closely. There are dark, dark circles under his eyes. It looks like he hasn’t slept since Aurora died. He probably hasn’t. His voice is a little cracked and so are his lips. His limbs shake a little with nervous energy, or maybe just exhaustion.

Ronan turns right. “Why are we going to a thrift store?” Blue asks.

“To buy shit,” Ronan replies.

Blue blinks at him. “Why are you buying shit from a thrift store?”

" _We’re_ buying shit from a thrift store,” Ronan corrects, and doesn’t say anything after that.

They pull into the parking lot of a big Goodwill in the city over from Henrietta. Ronan gets out and waits for Blue to get out, then locks the car and strides in. He picks up one of the tote bags they sell at the front for a dollar and wanders behind the clothes, and Blue stares around and has no idea what to do except to follow him.

She finds him in an aisle of ceramics, examining glassware. He holds up two long cups - one is a little concave, and one has a printed design on it. Some sort of corporate logo. “Which one pisses you off?”

Blue raises her eyebrows. “They’re glasses.”

“Pick one.”

Blue points to the one with the logo and Ronan puts it in the bag, then shuffles along to look at plates. Blue watches as he picks some up and examines them, then slides them delicately in the bag. He picks up wine glasses and mismatched bowls and table decorations - all made of glass or ceramic, all very fragile. Ronan handles them with care, placing each one neatly into the tote bag. He fills it until it’s full, and then he gives it to Blue and he gets another one and fills that one too.

Blue is baffled enough and tired enough that she just follows him as he goes up to the counter to pay for it. The total is something high and ridiculous - not as ridiculous as if they’d bought them at a real specialty store, and she didn’t know Ronan knew how to shop at places that _weren’t_ specialty stores, but ridiculous nonetheless. The cashier asks pleasant questions that Ronan doesn’t answer, and then falls into silence and hands him the receipt instead. Ronan scribbles his name on it and the cashier gives Ronan his credit card back and Ronan hefts the bags up in his arms and leaves, giving Blue little choice but to follow him out.

He straps the bags into the BMW’s back seat. Blue looks around for the Orphan Girl, but she’s nowhere to be seen. Well, that’s not entirely true. There are some dents and torn bits in the driver’s seat where she had kicked her hooves when she was being unmade, and there’s half of a chewed-on stick in the footwell. Other than that, though, there’s no evidence that Ronan’s last dream creature is anywhere near them. Blue wonders where she is, but Ronan doesn’t seem concerned, so she supposes it’s somewhere safe.

Ronan finishes buckling the bags in so they won’t shift, tying off the handles on top, and then gets back in the driver’s seat. Wordlessly, Blue gets in next to him. Ronan starts the car and pulls out of the parking lot and starts driving again. He doesn’t drive toward Henrietta, but he doesn’t drive away from it. He drives toward the mountains, in the direction of Cabeswater, or where Cabeswater would have been if it were allowed to be anymore.

Blue’s stomach feels icy. She doesn’t let herself think about it.

Ronan follows the winding road up in silence. There isn’t even any music playing, which strikes Blue as odd. She never particularly cared for his brand of electronica - she prefers things with melodies and notes and more than noise. Maybe that’s why Ronan had it off. He didn’t want the noise.

They don’t go to Cabeswater, or to the spot where Cabeswater should be. They go to a bit of land that’s mostly rocky with weeds poking out of cracks. There’s grass and trees ahead of it, but the spot Ronan stands in is just rock, slightly uneven, bits of gravel and plant matter scattered around, but all in all, dead. He holds the bags with him. Blue leans against the car and watches him look at nothing. He’s facing the wrong way for her to see his expression, but Blue would guess that it’s either very pained or very blank.

Then he turns around and comes back to her. He sets the bags down lightly and goes to the trunk. She looks over, not moving from the side of the car, but there’s no body in there, no strange, decaying dream thing that he has to get rid of like the night horrors. Instead of something terrifying, he pulls out a big brown tarp and carries it over to the rocky expanse of nothing and spreads it out. Blue watches him and wonders vaguely if he’s going to kill something.

He’s barely looked at her since the store, but he looks at her now. He’s much taller than her, but somehow he doesn’t give off the impression of looking down at her. They just share a look, one that says that Blue probably doesn’t understand how tired Ronan is and probably doesn’t want to.

Maura had been missing for months. She doesn’t know what she’d do if Maura was missing forever.

Ronan bends down and unknots the tops of the bags. The glassware clinks inside. Ronan picks up a big vase - it’s ugly and strangely shaped and not quite completely clear. There are scratches on the inside, like someone had filled it with rocks instead of water. Ronan weighs it between his hands.

Then he turns around and throws it at the tarp.

It shatters, and it shatters loudly. Blue jumps and her hands go halfway to her ears, then fall back down to her sides. The shards glint in the lowering sunlight. They look rather pretty, like bits of water, like tiny prisms.

“Ronan, what the hell?”

Ronan walks over to the bits of vase without answering. There’s a solid part left, some wide and wobbly edge, so he stomps on it. It crumbles easily under his boot. He grinds it down into dust.

Then he looks back at her. “Your turn.”

“What?” Blue asks.

“Your turn,” Ronan repeats. He walks back to her and digs through the bag and hands her the glass with the logo that she’d disliked. “Just throw it.”

“Ronan, what–”

“Gansey _died_ ,” Ronan says. Blue flinches. The words sound like they hurt to come out. “Gansey fucking–” He shakes his head and grabs a plate from the bag, then turns around and hurls it. It makes a different sound as it breaks.

It’s the sound Ronan made as he broke.

Ronan’s breathing a little heavier when he turns around. His eyes are bright with misery. “Gansey died,” he says again, quietly. “I watched him die. The thing I said I’d never do, I fucking watched him die in the street.” He swallows hard. “You did too. You were right there.”

Blue nods. It hurts to remember as much as it must hurt to say.

“You love him,” Ronan says. His voice is very quiet.

It’s not a question, but Blue answers anyway. “Yes.”

“And you had to watch him die,” Ronan says. “Like me.”

“Yeah,” Blue whispers.

Ronan steps forward a little and curls her hand around the cup. “Throw the glass, Sargent.”

Blue throws the glass.

She throws it hard. She throws it harder than she had been anticipating, hard enough that it kind of hurts a little. The glass shatters loudly on top of the plate and the vase. It’s not like Ronan’s first throw; there’s not enough left to step on.

Ronan reaches down and hands Blue a plate.

Blue smashes it.

He hands her another glass.

She smashes that too.

He hands her the rest of the bag, then takes the second one for himself. He stands a foot away from her and turns a plate over and over in his hands, then lets out a loud, anguished yell and throws it down in front of him. It misses the tarp and the sound it makes is that much louder for it. Blue doesn’t flinch. It sounds like what she feels like on the inside.

“My mom is dead,” Ronan says loudly to the rest of the mountain. “She fucking _died_.” He throws a wine glass. It breaks elegantly. He looks at Blue. His eyes are brighter. It hurts to look at them. “It ripped her apart.”

Blue swallows hard. “I know.”

“I brought her back,” Ronan says. “Bits of her.” His throat works hard. “I saw her in the dream.”

“Not in real life?”

“What the hell is real life anymore?” Ronan says.

Blue thinks about that for a minute.

Ronan leans heavily against the side of the car. “Noah,” he breathes.

Blue swallows.

She takes a bowl and flings it at the ground. It breaks into big chunks, so she goes over and steps on them like Ronan had done until they couldn’t break anymore. She stands in the middle of a pile of broken glass and tilts her head back and yells.

It’s a directionless yell. Somewhere, birds call back their distaste for being disturbed. Around them, nothing changes, but the thin bits of thread that have been holding Blue Sargent together since September finally snap.

She goes back to the bag and grabs a pint glass and throws that, and then a shot glass, and then a commemorative twenty-fifth anniversary plate for something she doesn’t care about, and then a heavy glass candleholder that she doesn’t expect to shatter but does. She throws things into the pile and stomps all over it and listens to the glass grind under her feet. It’s the sound she makes as she’s breaking.

She destroys the contents of her bag and Ronan allows her his as she breaks. The shattering, crashing sounds fill her ears and her lungs and her soul. She screams out words, sometimes, Noah’s name and Gansey’s name and loud curses. They work their way free with no help from her; it’s like they’ve been waiting for an outlet after she’d swallowed them down for so long that they couldn’t see the light of being spoken.

She sees the light now, glinting through the pile of broken glass as the sun catches it at just the right angle.

She’s panting, now, and screaming, screaming nothing in particular but just letting energy out. Blue is a battery and she has a lot of energy and every single bit of it right now is grief.

Arms wrap around her from the back as she doubles over a little, but Ronan pulls her back against him. He hugs her tightly and buries his face in her spiky hair, which has been less spiky for her not having the energy to take care of it. She realizes she’s crying when his hand smears unsteadily over her cheek and the path it leaves is cold in the mountain air.

“Noah,” she murmurs to Ronan.

“I think he’s gone,” Ronan says.

Because there’s nothing left in the bags to shatter, Blue lets it happen to herself.

She sinks down to sit on the rocky ground and presses her face into her knees. Her eye hurts badly and she doesn’t care. Ronan is wrapped around her, his legs splayed on either side of hers and his arms wrapped around her belly and his face buried in her shoulder. He’s shaking against her back; Blue thinks he might be crying too. He clings to her like he had when he’d saved her from falling, like he had when he’d kept her from walking into the lake where lies were told and truths were eaten away. She curls her fingers around his wrists and feels his bracelets and his old scar tissue and the way he’s trembling.

She screams into her knees and he doesn’t pull away from her, even though it must hurt his ears. It hurts her throat, and she keeps doing it, because Gansey died and Noah died and Cabeswater, _Cabeswater_ , had died. Cabeswater, the place that had felt safe and loving, the place that had recognized her, the place that had needed her. Cabeswater had died and given those things to Gansey and she still can’t decide if it’s a fair trade.

Eventually, her body runs out of noise and she slumps back against Ronan’s chest. He holds onto her tightly and he doesn’t move at all but he doesn’t let go either. The shoulder of her shirt is wet; he had been crying too. She hadn’t been sure until now, but now that she knows, she doesn’t know what else he could have possibly done.

The sun goes down. Ronan doesn’t let go of her, but he pulls her back so he can leans against the side of the BWM and she can lean against him. They watch a few stars pop out and a plane fly by. Blue’s face feels stiff and uncomfortable, but for the first time since before Gansey died, she feels like she can breathe.

She leans her head against his shoulder, then pushes forward out of his grip. He lets her go and she starts toeing the bits of plate and mug that had escaped from the tarp back onto it. He watches her for a while, then gets up onto his knees and scoops handfuls of glass and rock together and piles it onto the rest of the rubble. Once they’ve picked up most of it - environmentalist Blue is annoyed that she would leave glass there, but tired grieving Blue doesn’t care enough to pick it all up - Ronan scoops up the tarp like a big pouch and ties knots with the ends and places it back in the footwell in the back seat. Then he gets into the driver’s seat and Blue gets into the passenger’s seat and Ronan starts the car. He backs up and does a sharp turn to get them onto the road and drives back to Henrietta. They don’t say anything, but after a few minutes, Blue turns on his stereo and plays some electronica quietly. It sounds like the noise she just excised from herself, and it feels good not to have it inside.

 


End file.
